


The Back Road

by etal



Series: Fairy Tales / Folk Tales [3]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: AU, Death, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, M/M, Minor Character Death, Yuki-Onna - Freeform, charmie-adjacent, inspired by Kwaidan (1965), soft focus sex, supernatural horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 11:22:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16094672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etal/pseuds/etal
Summary: The winter that year was the worst in anyone's memory.Supernatural AU.





	The Back Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ghostcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostcat/gifts).



The Back Road west of Sakeston was unlucky. There’d been three wrecks along there in the last ten years alone. It ran straight out of town for a few miles and then followed the dip down into the woods where the trees grew dense, crowding the road and blocking the sun. It was hard to tell which of the stories the town told about the woods were true and which were myth; there were tales going back centuries of children lost or stolen, another of two missing sisters wandering out of the trees, scared mad. Sometimes the story went that only one of the sisters came out alive and she never spoke again. Either way, it was enough to make the woods a place of dares and nightmares for the Sakeston kids.

Through the winter, branches would bend and break under the piled weight of snow and often made the Back Road impassable and John Parrish and Armie Hammer, the town’s tree guys, had a hell of a job to keep it clear. From spring to fall they were in demand to pollard and prune orchards and keep boundary lines neat, but John always said it was over winter that they earned their money. Clearing the Back Road meant hard work out in the cold but the town needed them to get the job done. 

The winter that year was the worst in anyone’s memory. On the first clear morning after a three day white-out, they got a call about a treefall blocking the way far along the Back Road. They got a good start but it took them longer than it should have done to chop and clear the tangled mass of branches clawing out over the road. Armie’s chainsaw kept failing to catch and its explosive rattle would choke out into silence more often than not, sending abortive bolts of sound echoing back through the still air.

It was late afternoon by the time they stopped to eat their sandwiches in the cab of the truck. Snow began to fall again and a breath of wind chased the flakes across the windshield.

“Dark early,” John said.

“Looks like,” replied Armie.

“Time to head back. No point goin' on today.”

That was the way it was between them. John was somewhere near sixty and he was the boss. He’d taken Armie on five years ago, when Armie was eighteen, and Armie never minded following his orders. John was no coward but he knew the way the woods and weather worked and if he said it was time to go, it was time to go. Armie packed away his lunch and blew on his cold fingers before he twisted the keys in the ignition. He turned the truck carefully back towards town but they’d barely got fifty yards along the road when a tree came crashing down in front of them, smashing right into the hood, one jagged branch splintering the windscreen and missing John’s head by inches. 

Armie hated to leave the truck sitting there on the road, but there was no hope of moving it without a tow. They set off homeward on foot. The snow was falling in earnest now and the wind was building, whipping the flakes against their faces until it was difficult to look ahead. More than once they heard the crash of another branch falling. It became harder to make progress in the gathering dark, by now they were breaking a path through the new fallen snow. And the storm was worsening, a furious living thing, shrieking into their faces in a bitter, one-sided fight.

They’d driven a long way in to reach the treefall and it was at least five miles back to town. Armie let the cold bite at his wrist as he checked his watch: 5pm. There was no phone reception this deep into the woods and no-one could risk coming out to look for them. John must have been making the same calculations because he shouted something Armie couldn’t hear and when he saw him shake his head, tugged him down so he could shout straight into his ear, “Gettin’ worse. Get to the lake cabin.”

“Yep.” Although it’s no day for swimming, he added to himself.

The cold was inside his jacket now, exploring ways to get under his layers of fleece and flannel to pinch at his skin. They struggled on to the bend in the road where the track to the lake began and then slid down the steep bank to the creek bed, frozen solid underfoot. On the other side the walking was a little easier where the tree canopy kept some of the snow from reaching the forest floor but it was still exhausting just putting one foot in front of another and Armie’s eyes were getting heavy. He yawned and stumbled, like a tired child, and fell into moments of drowsiness as he walked, and began to think how nice it would be to lie down on the ground and sleep. He could hear John talking at himself in a chiding voice, a father’s voice, muttering that he knew better than to come out on a day like this, that he was a fool who couldn’t find his own ass with two hands. 

But then there it was, just ahead, a few more paces only, the gunmetal spread of the lake and, hunched beside it, the small fishing cabin, barely more than a hut, but mercifully unlocked and solid. The door opened to Armie’s shove and stepping out of the wind was a blessed relief, although Armie’s ears rang with the memory of it. Whoever had sheltered here last had left a bundle of sticks in the rudimentary fireplace and John rooted in his pack for matches. Once they had a fire going and had eaten the last of the sandwiches and a hunk of peanut brittle, Armie’s blood begin to move again and he felt like he could sleep. 

“We’ll get out come first light,” John said. “You warm enough, Hammer?”

“Not dead yet,” Armie said.

Armie drowsed. He was aware of John once or twice putting more wood on the fire. He dreamed that a man who must be John’s father was there with them, shouting, telling John to get out. He heard John say “get out” and thought that sounded real and loud and he woke to find that the fire was dead. It was very cold. His fingers were numb in his gloves, and then he realised that the door of the hut was open. The moonlight fell bright across the stone floor onto the black remains of the fire and John asleep beside it. When he tried to say “John” into the still, silvered silence, Armie’s breath clouded in front of him and the word froze behind his teeth.

Because next to John, impossibly, there stood a figure, as white and cold as the moonlight, as dark and silent as the night. Armie could not move, his very breath stopped. It could not be and yet it _was_ , a boy, soft around the edges as if he were concocted of mist or ice vapour, but indubitably _there_. He was pale as death, paler, a marble statue with the cold blue glow of new fallen snow. With a shock, Armie saw that he was barefoot and he felt a strange pang of sympathy for the poor creature whose feet must be so pained. As Armie watched, helpless and immobile, he bent over John and seemed to hover there. John did not move, but he gasped, his mouth opened and the apparition leaned down to him, as if to kiss him, but instead he was _pulling_ from John’s mouth, stealing the breath from his prone body. It went on and on and Armie did nothing, he lay petrified until the white figure lifted John clear from the floor in a tight embrace and then dropped him. John’s head struck the floor with a sickening crack, landing twisted towards Armie, his eyes open but empty and unseeing.

The figure was stronger now, its edges more defined. It... _he_ looked human. Armie felt his body become gelid, frozen in place, as the boy turned his blank gaze slowly to him. He was beautiful, but his beauty was awful and unearthly, his bloodless lips and white skin stark against his dark hair. He was like nothing Armie had ever seen or imagined. He seemed to be made of the night and the snow, the depths of the lake and the shadows of the forest, and although Armie wanted to scream, to fight and run back to the living world, he felt a dreadful ache in his heart, a desire for the boy to come to him and touch him as he’d touched John. He wanted to be gathered in and taken, swallowed up and overcome and he felt his frozen fingers twitch, as if they were trying to reach towards this revelation.

Then like a record skipping, time jumped, and the boy was close to him, looking straight into his eyes, leaning in until Armie felt a deep coldness press all the way through him. For a long time he looked _into_ Armie and then he opened his lips: they were shaped with the graceful curve of a beech leaf but the space between them was the liquid black of a deep well. In the tiny remainder of his mind that was left to Armie’s own thoughts, he said a goodbye: to the sparse collection of souls on the planet who would notice his absence, to his truck, to his trees. 

But then he realised he could hear a sound which was like a skating blade on ice. The boy was speaking to him.

“You… are younger than that other one. And you are … handsome.” He bent his head to Armie and, incongruously, sniffed at him, settling his cold lips behind his ear. “Is that the sun? Is that smell of the sun on your skin?”

Armie couldn’t reply. He couldn’t remember the sun.

“And you have gold in your hair and your eyes are blue. The daylight sky is that color but it is a long time since I have seen the blue sky.”

“Please…” Armie thought it, maybe, rather than said it, but the boy seemed to hear it anyway.

“'Please'?” For a moment, a suggestion of amusement touched that beautiful, terrible mouth and he seemed to pause, thinking. “My sky is always dark. I am always hungry. I should kill you now.”

Armie thought briefly of his mother, how lonely she would be without him. Then he thought how lonely it must be to be always in the dark and he said, “Your feet must be cold.”

When it came, the boy’s reply was the whistle of wind through a keyhole. “I am always cold. I am always hungry. My sky is always dark.”

Even now, beginning to hope that he might live to see the morning, and survive when John had died, Armie didn’t want the boy to go. He wanted only to look at his face and never take his eyes away, even if he froze to death as he did it. If his eyes blurred as his heart gave out and his breath was sucked from his lungs, he would keep them open for as long as he could to fix that face in his dying mind’s eye.

“Please,” Armie whispered.

“ _Please_ ,” he repeated. His dark eyes held Armie pinned and his mouth was so close. “If I let you live you can never tell anyone what you saw here. No-one. If you so much as whisper about me to anyone, even your own mother, I will kill you. Do you understand? Do you promise?”

Armie could barely summon the strength to nod.

“Remember your promise: never speak of me or next time there will be no mercy.”

There was a whirl of wind and a flurry of snow and he was gone, the door slammed shut fast and Armie was alone with poor John Parrish.

Later, when he tried to remember that night, Armie could only recall snatches of the long hours of darkness and wrenching cold that followed. He had made himself look to John, to close his eyes and cover his face and then lain huddled by him until a watery sun rose, the world outside mobile in the thaw. He had no memory of leaving the cabin and getting through the woods but they found him by the bend on the Back Road, nearly dead from cold and stammering John’s name. 

He was as good as dead for months after. The cold had hurt him badly, got inside him somehow, and he could never be warm, no matter how many bowls of chicken soup his mother made him eat. He barely left his bed until the spring came. “He doesn’t smile anymore and he won’t say a word to me,” he heard his mother say to her friends when they came to the door to ask after him. “It’s like he’s all froze up.” 

When the weather was warmer, she began to fuss him into the yard to get some sun and sit him in the porch swingseat with a quilt on him so he could look out at the meadow. His friend Pete Jedburgh visited with his wife and their new baby boy and slowly he began to be able to talk in a normal way again. As time passed, he started to doubt what he had seen and the memory faded as daylight matters regained his attention. But still, in his nightmares, he lay on the floor of the cabin and saw the face of the boy over him again and felt his cold lips against his pulse of his neck. Then he would wake up, shivering and calling out in fear but shamefully hard between his legs, and he would be sharp with his mother if his shouts had woken her and brought her into his room.

As the summer went by, Armie started to find himself again. He had fewer of the nightmares, his color came back and he even whistled once or twice in the mornings. His mother became brisker in her manner towards him. “You have to decide Armie,” she said, eventually. “Lord knows I don’t want you going into those woods again but needs must and without John Parrish, God rest him, the town needs a good tree man.” 

So Armie went to the garage and took the tarp off his truck and within a week he was back at work. When winter came round he got Pete to help him along the Back Road but they never went with only one truck and they never stayed in the woods past noon. Mostly though, he worked alone. He sometimes talked to John in his head, telling him how his favorite trees were doing and trying to remember all the tracks John had shown him. He avoided the lakeside. The months passed quietly, until there were five years between him and the night in the woods. 

He was driving home one March evening along the Back Road, with the windows down and the radio on, enjoying the first warmth of the year. He never did it quite consciously but whenever he came to the deep bend in the road his eyes would flick over to the place where the track towards the lake threaded through the trees and so his attention was not where it should have been as he rounded the bend, and suddenly saw a flash of pink up ahead, someone walking by the side of the road, and he had to swerve sharply to avoid hitting them.

He stopped the truck, turned the radio off, and rested his hands on the wheel for a second to calm himself, then leaned out of the window to shout back, “Are you OK? I didn’t see you.”

The person he had nearly hit was a young man, alone, heading in the direction of town. As he approached, Armie called out again, “I’m sorry if I scared you, shit, I nearly hit you. I didn’t see you.”

The man came up to the window, curling his fingertips over the edge of its rim and glanced around the truck before his eyes settled on Armie’s face. He didn’t seem at all shaken by having been nearly plastered all over Armie’s grille. He smiled, and his smile was so warm, so open and sweet, that Armie found himself smiling too, immediately, as if he was looking at a baby or a little dog he liked. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anybody so good-looking in his whole life, not even the prettiest of the cheerleaders at school had had such beautiful eyes – eyes the exact color of moss he thought- or such a perfect face.

“I’m really sorry.” Armie said again. “You OK?”

“OK? I guess I am,” he replied, and he laughed. 

“Where you headed?”

“Uh…” He screwed his face into a grimace as if it was difficult to remember or embarrassing to say and pointed in the direction of town, with both arms goofily bent over his head, “there.”

“Sakeston? You want a ride? It’s risky walking this road and you've a ways to go yet.”

Armie swung the door open and the kid hesitated, looking up and down the road. 

It took Armie a second but then he got it, “Right, sorry man, look I’m Armie, I’m the tree guy in town. This is just my truck. I swear I’m not, like, an axe murderer or anything.” 

“Oh…” the kid said, “well I guess that’s alright then, uh, OK... I’m Tim.” He started to climb up into the cab but his lost his footing somehow and sprawled into the seat. Armie put out a hand to catch him and settle him, and Tim laughed again and said, “I’m such a klutz, I can't even... thanks Armie.” When he laughed he opened his mouth wide and showed all his white teeth and his pink tongue, but his laugh wasn’t loud, it was breathy, almost silent. It made Armie laugh too, and he pulled the seat belt out around Tim and then started the truck up. As they drove he stole a couple of glances at Tim and tried to puzzle him out. He didn’t smell bad or anything, but he didn’t have a lot of stuff, just a canvas bag which seemed kind of light, and his clothes were a weird mix: a large pink hoodie, more like something a mom might wear, with tight black jeans and a pair of scuffed shoes that weren’t much more than slippers and looked way too big for him, all frayed along the edges. Did he mean to look like that? Armie wasn’t sure.

“So who do you know in town?” he asked after a moment

“No-one, well…” Tim replied and he made the slightest gesture towards Armie.

“Oh right, yeah,” Armie said and felt suddenly shy. “What brings you here? We don’t get many visitors.”

“Just passing through - looking for work, anything really, maybe try and get to the city. I don’t have much money so I’ve been hitching. Or waiting for people to run me over and then give me a ride.” He grinned. “But I took a wrong turn a while back I think and lost my bearings and no-one’s stopped for me all day.”

He leaned his head out of the passenger-side window, his hair blowing all around his face and he laughed again. “I like your truck.”

“Where are you coming from?” Armie asked him.

“Nowhere much.”

“No family?” It probably wasn’t polite to ask this many questions but Tim didn’t seem to mind. He shrugged.

“There was. But they’ve gone and I’m on my own now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s OK, how about you?”

“Uh, there’s just me and my mom.” 

They were quiet for a while. Armie was turning a thought over in his mind. The sun was going down and he couldn’t leave this kid by the side of the road with his crappy shoes and his empty bag. 

As they swung into town, he cleared his throat and said, “If you need a bed for the night, my Mom and I would be glad to have you stay. You can get something to eat and clean up and get started again in the morning. She’s a good cook and it’s pot roast tonight.”

“Really? I wouldn’t want to, like, impose.”

“It’s fine, she always makes too much food and there’s more than one spare room. She’d never forgive me if she knew I’d let you walk off on your own without letting her feed you.”

The Hammer place was set apart from the other houses, right on the edge of town, with their meadow stretching out behind it. The small vegetable garden was tucked in against the fence, nine bean rows standing ready. When Armie was younger, there’d been a big pumpkin patch, and maize, but they’d dug them over now. The two barns still stood and Armie kept them watertight, but the yard was empty apart from Armie’s mom’s little car. 

“It used to be… well, we sold most of the farm stuff after Dad died,” Armie explained as they parked up and he saw Tim looking around at everything. “I was still in school and Mom didn’t have the heart to keep the business running. And it hadn’t been going great before then anyway. C’mon, we’ll go in and you can meet her.”

*

“Well. Look at you. Of course you can stay. I’d never have forgiven Armie if he’d have let you go walking off on your own in the dark.” Armie caught Tim’s eye over his Mom’s head and winked as she started setting another place at the table and hustled them to the sink to wash. “No ‘Mrs Hammer’ please, call me Ann, and let’s be comfortable and get you fed.”

Tim pleased Ann to bits by eating two helpings of everything and then helping with the clearing up while Armie went out to put the truck away. She wouldn’t take him seriously at first when he asked her how she made her tomatoes taste so good but before long they were down in the cellar and she was showing off her shelves of preserves and pickles.

“There now, you can stay as long as you like, sweetheart,” she said as she headed to bed. “Armie could do with some company and I’ve got some jobs around the place that he’s too busy for I guess. You shouldn't be going to the city all alone, with no-one to take care of you and make sure you eat. You’re too skinny and that’s a fact.”

Tim didn’t seem to have much in the way of spare clothes so Armie hunted in the back of his wardrobe and pulled out a bag of his old stuff, worn and mended here and there but clean. He handed it over and Tim was so pleased that Armie was embarrassed. 

“It’s just a few shirts, but there’s a couple of pairs of pants and there should be a belt, you’re gonna need that…Jesus…what are you…?”

Tim had stripped off his pink hoodie and shucked off the tight jeans, and he was completely naked. He was pulling the shirts and tees out of the bag, exclaiming over each thing. Armie had also dug out a pair of old white sneakers with cracked soles. Their shoelaces were frayed so Armie had taken the red laces from his least-used workboots and replaced them. It looked a little weird but Tim cradled the shoes against his chest. 

“I love them, thank you.”

He was still naked. Armie swallowed, not looking, and said, “Sure. Well. I don’t need them.”

Tim stayed that night, sleeping in the small back bedroom off the kitchen. He stayed the next night, and the next, and he was still there a couple of weeks later when the blossom was gone from the Pritchards’ cherry orchard and it was time for Armie to begin the spruce-spider checks on the conifer plantations. They didn’t exactly introduce Tim around town but word seemed to spread and one day Armie was halfway up the tallest of the Hawthornes’ firs when Eli Hawthorne passed by and called up to him.

“Met your house guest.” Eli gave a rusty snicker which caught Armie by surprise. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Old Eli Hawthorne so much as smile. “ _Queer_ feller. Made me a cup of coffee. Good coffee.”

It was Ann who’d taught Tim how to make good coffee and pretty soon she was teaching him to cook as well. There were lots of jokes at Armie’s expense about how he’d never learnt to boil an egg. Armie didn’t mind, he was glad to see her happy and Tim cheered her up. He could make her giggle like a teenage girl and she deserved that. Armie was coming down the stairs one evening about a month after Tim had arrived and he heard them talking together as they shelled peas at the kitchen table. She was telling Tim what Armie already knew, that she was sick, that she didn’t have long left. “I don’t mind for myself,” she was saying, “I’ll be with Jesus and I’ll see my Henry again but I was worried for Armie, all on his own. And now, praise be, Providence brought you here. You can stay with him and make sure he eats.”

Armie had to stay hidden in the hall for a minute, pressing the heels of his hands hard against his eyes, but when he came into the kitchen, they were hugging and crying-laughing over the spilt bowl of peas between them. Nobody mentioned Tim leaving after that.

She died in her own bed, without too much struggle, and during the last weeks when grief kept Armie outside and at work for as long as there was light to see by, Tim was the one who nursed her and kept her company. He was gentle with her, and so patient, and Armie couldn’t even feel jealous when it was Tim’s hand she wanted to hold when the pain was at its worst. 

When they got back home after the funeral, Armie went straight to bed. He didn’t get up the following day and the next morning, Tim brought him coffee and sat cross-legged on the quilt.

“She said you’d do this. She said, let him have one day to mope, then get him moving. So you’d better drink this and get dressed.”

Armie stared down at the coffee, made just how he liked it, with only a drop of milk, and said, “Will you stay?” He forced himself to look up, into those mossy eyes, and steeled himself for the end of it all.

But Tim said, “Yes please. If you want me to.”

Tim took over the cooking and the housework right away. He studied Ann’s cookbooks and carried on with his lessons from the recipes on the pages with the corners turned down: corned beef hash, roast chicken, apple pie. He also experimented, wildly at first, and with a certain disregard for the usual combinations. 

Armie was glad of it, especially when it came time to help Pete Jedburgh out with the lambing because those were long days. When Pete dropped him home, Tim had made a stew and there was cornbread, wrapped up in napkins to keep warm. He set an extra plate for Pete as if there wasn't any question but that he'd be staying to eat. Pete was shy at first, keeping his eyes on his food, but they drank some beer and Tim told a story about how he’d misread a recipe and made smoothies with butternut squash instead of buttermilk and Armie had drunk it all without saying anything, and they told Tim about pranks they’d pulled at school. Tim laughed his crazy laugh and Armie watched his hands and how his eyes crinkled in anticipation of something funny or widened if the story was kind of tense, and then how deftly he washed up after dinner, how carefully he handled all of Ann’s kitchen stuff as he put it away in the right places.

The next morning, Tim was packing Armie’s lunch – ham sandwiches and a flask of tomato soup – when Armie asked, “You want to come out with me today?” 

They drove down to the Back Road and parked up along an avenue of oaks and lugged Armie’s gear to the base of one of the largest trees. Armie laid his hand against it.

“This is one of John’s sentinel trees.”

“What’s a sentinel tree?” Tim asked, putting his own hand next to Armie’s, stroking the ridged trunk. 

“It’s one you watch for signs of disease, or infestation, it’s the oldest and strongest so you know there’s trouble if it looks unhealthy but it also means – it’s silly - but it’s sort of the one that keeps watch over the others. It can look after itself, but we do a little cutting back, let the light in and keep the ivy and creepers from getting a hold. John always used to say these guys were here long before us and they’ll be here long after too. We just give them a bit of help, stop ‘em getting in our way.”

“I like the way you talk about the trees,” Tim said. “You're a proper arborist.”

“A what now?”

“An arborist, that’s your job isn’t it?

“Well. I’m the tree guy.”

“You’re more than that.” Tim put his arms around the tree and pressed his cheek to its trunk, closing his eyes. “It feels strong,” he said. “And alive. If I’m quiet I should be able to hear its heartbeat.”

He said things like that sometimes: words that sounded like they were out of books and Armie knew that when he was younger he would have scoffed but he liked the way Tim said things and he liked the way Tim saw things, as if he was looking at them from a different direction from everybody else. He took the opportunity of Tim’s closed eyes to look at him longer than he would usually allow himself to, at Tim’s creamy cheek pressed against the gnarled bark, his pink lips curled into a sleepy smile. But then his eyes snapped open and he caught Armie looking and Armie blushed.

“Wanna go up?” Armie said. 

Tim bit his lip, craning his neck as he took in the height of the tree, but then he took a breath and nodded. Armie held out the climbing harness and changed its circumference to fit his slim hips. He had to kneel to cinch the straps around Tim’s thighs and wrap a hand around one hipbone to keep a hold while he adjusted the clip on each side. He made the touch as brief and light as possible. Tim was looking down at him, his hair around his face and his smile very soft. Armie felt heat along the back of his neck, and got briskly to his feet, busying himself with throwing the weighted end of the rope up and over a branch to form the pulley.

“So, you just hold on, both hands, here.” He showed where to grip the rope. "I’ll pull you up and I'll keep hold of the rope so you don’t sway too much, OK?”

In the first few moments when his feet left the ground, Tim gasped and clung on with white knuckles.

“Don’t let me fall, Armie!”

“You can’t fall, it’s all secure, I promise.”

He was so light that only a few pulls had him eight feet up and Armie stopped him there, letting him get used to the height, then took him further so that he was among the branches, surrounded by the tree’s soft green light. At first he held on tight, staying very still, but then he started to relax and when Armie allowed the rope to turn him a little he held his fingers out to catch at acorns.

“Oh! I can see a bird’s nest,” he whispered, pointing, laughing his silent laugh down to Armie. “There are eggs.” Then he tipped his head back and span slowly as the sun shone through the leaves onto his tawny hair.

When Armie brought him gently down, he landed dizzily and Armie caught him in his arms.

“Thank you,” Tim said, his hands on Armie’s shoulders, and then around his neck, and then they were kissing under the dappled light, Tim against the tree and his legs wrapping around Armie’s waist. Armie was immediately lost, gone, in the wet heat of the kiss and the feeling of Tim’s body under his hands but when they stopped for breath, Tim laughed, straight-out _laughed_ against Armie’s mouth. Armie pulled back, frowning.

“What? Was that not…”

“Take me home,” Tim whispered. The twisting miles of the Back Road had never seemed so long and as soon as Armie stopped the truck outside their house, Tim was out of the door and running, not inside, but round to the meadow behind, “C’mon,” he shouted back, “what are you waiting for?”

So Armie followed, running too, stepping over Tim’s discarded clothes, his t-shirt, his sweats, shorts, and caught up with him as he was hopping, trying to get his shoe off. Armie tackled him sideways and they fell, breathless, wrestling, laughing into the grass. Armie couldn’t think, couldn’t argue with or stall himself; he rolled and let Tim straddle him and pretend he could hold Armie down by his wrists, crossed above his head.

“Do you give in?” Tim said.

“I do, I do, only… “

“Yes?”

“Kiss me.” 

And very gently, Tim bent his lips to Armie’s and kissed him, first his mouth, then every part of his face. They barely knew what to do with each other after that but Armie’s clothes came off and they put their hands on each other’s cocks and stroked and gasped their way into a place of hilarious rapture. Lying back afterwards, with Tim in his arms, Armie closed his eyes against the sun as it streamed around them, feeling its heat on his naked skin and knew he had never been so happy and so unafraid.

Tim didn’t go back to his bedroom off the kitchen that night but Armie’s bed turned out to be big enough for the two of them. 

*  
The next time Pete stopped by he brought his wife, Mary. She and Tim talked baking like a pair of happy grandmas so the time after that their three kids came too, Tom and Little Mary and baby Sam toddling after them, and from then on joint dinners became a regular thing. Armie ended up spending most of his June Saturdays building a climbing frame in the yard and putting up a tyre swing on the sycamore by the meadow fence to keep the kids busy. Tim would race around with them all over the yard, let them catch him and climb all over him or lie quietly in the grass making daisy chains with Little Mary by the hour.

When the soft fruits ripened, Mary showed Tim how to make jam and Tim got obsessed with finding the perfect recipe, so then the house was full of women from morning to night, cooking up vats of plum preserve and raspberry jam and Armie had to excuse his way through his own kitchen with a plate of leftovers and eat on the porch. But, later, Tim would come to bed tasting of sugar and wanting Armie to suck his burnt fingers better, and the jam did turn out well. With Mary’s help, Tim got started selling it at farmers’ markets; Armie made him a wooden box to keep his money in and Tim kept careful records of his profits in a series of little account books. 

Watching the Jedburgh kids play on the swing gave Armie an idea and in August he took Tim back to their sentinel oak. Armie had slung a rope ladder over one branch but it was attached with pegs and bands of rope around the trunk. “No nails,” said Armie. “It won’t even know we’re here.”

He’d built a treehouse. It was egg-shaped, constructed of long ribbons of wood, bending round the trunk of the tree. The floor was level, but the walls and ceiling curved all around, just high enough so you could kneel upright. There were gaps in the lattice and a circle cut-out opened out to the treetops and the evening sky.

When Tim had scrambled up the rope ladder and into the little space, he gasped. 

“Armie! It’s a nest.”

“Your nest,” said Armie. “But you’ll have to share it with the birds if they want to come in.”

Armie had stowed a rollmat and an old quilt in a critter-proof tin box, set in one corner. He hadn’t said anything to himself about why he’d put it there but when he showed it to Tim, he immediately unrolled it and lay down, and drew Armie down on top of him and they fucked there, with the sound of the forest all around them and the tree holding them high above the ground.

That first year together, Armie discovered that the joys and secrets of Tim’s body, and his own desire for it, were endless; when Armie undressed him he would marvel at the way the light illuminated his pale skin so that it shone like the smooth white stones at the bottom of the creek when the sun found them. When he drove into him, no matter how hard, how desperate he was, Tim would take it all and strain up further to meet him. After the leaves had turned golden and the cold crept across the meadow, Armie’s - _their_ bed was a miracle of warmth, a cosy den where Tim could curl around him like honeysuckle around an oak, his silken mouth on Armie’s cock making him shout with pleasure, the heat of it making Armie see bursts of color behind his closed eyes.

They did things together that Armie had never allowed himself to think about, and if he _had_ , maybe, he would have imagined it only ever happening in a bed, in the dark. But Tim seemed to see no difference between the kitchen table and the porch swing, between the privacy of their treehouse and the forest path where anyone might see them. When the summer came round again and he got back from work, Tim would be waiting, smiling, barefoot and shirtless, and Armie would try at least to tug him round to the back of the house and into the meadow before he let him sink to his knees. 

On those summer evenings, their shadows stretched long against the grass. The meadow was loud with the accretion of quiet sounds, the breeze and the bees, his own choked moans and Tim's endless, jumbled commentary on what they were doing ("Oh that feels good, do you like it? What does it feel like? I can feel you all through me. Tell me.. do you like it...") and Armie would try to find the words to reply, always tongue-tied. He was used to quiet, whole days sometimes where he might not hear a word unless he spoke it to himself. Tim, though, could wake up mid-sentence, carrying on a conversation from the night before. Imagine, he might say, if there were bridges between the trees so you didn't have to walk on the ground. Or, imagine if all the houses had forests and gardens on the roof and it was alright for the animals and the birds to live there as well, like in our treehouse. Armie said he didn't think that one would work but the next day he drew plans for a house with a turf roof.

*

Once Tim had worked out how to do a thing there was no stopping him and the jam turned out only to be the beginning of it. He came up from the cellar one morning with a jar of Ann’s preserved peaches and said, puzzled, “this is the last one. Do you know how to make more?”

Armie shrugged helplessly and Tim rolled his eyes. That very day he set about learning how to bottle fruit, and also started taking proper notice of the garden. He revived the pumpkin patch and planted out peppers, zucchini and tomatoes. He even got grapes going in the sun trap at the back of one of the barns and bartered them for peaches from the Hawthornes' orchards so he could restock the cellar and still have some left over for his market stall. 

The next time Armie had to file a tax form, he hesitated over what box to check to describe the Hammer property. Sitting at the kitchen table with the door open to the yard and the meadow beyond it, he could hear the chickens squabbling in the coop he’d had to extend twice already, next to the goat pen. There were three baskets of apples by the door, ready for stewing for the approaching chutney frenzy. He picked up his pen and ticked ‘Smallholding’.

Tim hadn’t just bought life back into the garden: Armie always had company now on his work days, because after Tim bought home a handful of tabby kittens he’d found in a bag by the road, the next thing was a lame mongrel Jed Hawthorne had been about to shoot, and then a black lab who followed Armie everywhere and sulked when he had to give up the passenger seat of the truck to Tim. It was chaos a lot of the time, but a good chaos. Once when they were sitting on the porch in the evenings with the dogs by them, and the cats skittering between the barn and Tim’s lap, Armie found himself saying, “family.” Tim kissed the cat in his arms, and said into its fur, “almost.”

It was in the December that Mary Jedburgh was killed out on the Back Road. No-one could imagine where she'd been headed or why she would drive on a bad snow day when she knew fine well how dangerous it was, but she drove right off the road and down the bank and died out there before anyone could find her. The only mercy was that she didn’t have the kids with her but it was a terrible thing for everyone. Pete started up drinking in the evenings and then in the mornings and he got so bad that Armie and Tim took to having the kids over after school and at the weekends. As Tim said, they didn’t need to see him like that when they were still trying to come to terms with losing their mother. After a few nights of putting them in the guest bedroom, Armie fixed up some bunkbeds and Tim cleared out drawers for them, got in a stock of new toothbrushes and pyjamas. They made Christmas for the kids because Pete disappeared on them and didn’t come back until after New Year. He said he’d straighten up but he just got worse and worse. He wasn’t working and Armie knew the farm was already on shaky ground. He helped out when he could but Pete wasn’t listening to sense by then and when the red bank letters started to arrive, he stopped answering the door to Armie.

The kids had given up asking when they were going back home by the time Armie went over to the Jedburgh place and found Pete hanging from the crossbeam of the big barn. 

He’d left a note: there wasn’t any money left and the farm went straight to the bank but he wanted Armie and Tim to take the kids. It took a bit of arguing and a couple of expensive lawyers’ letters, but after a time the kids were fixed with them permanently. The town mothers raised their eyebrows and settled back to watch how it was going to go, but it wasn't long before they had to agree that Tim was managing just fine: he got Tom and Mary onto the bus on time every day, always clean and tidy, and supervised their homework, he made them good lunches and read with them at night. While the big ones were at school, Baby Sam sat in his high chair at the table, with his own mixing bowl and a mess of flour and water to stir while Tim canned and bottled and experimented with new pie-fillings for the market.

“It’s amazing how quickly they’ve adjusted,” Armie murmured, watching them playing in the yard, bundled up warm against the cold.

Tim laid his head on Armie’s shoulder and snuggled closer. “They just need to know there’s someone watching out for them, someone who cares enough to make them a nest and keep them safe.”

Armie lifted his chin and kissed him, there was still no end to the kisses he wanted from Tim. No matter how busy their days were, there was always the promise of getting him on his own and finding his way back into the softest parts of him, coaxing him into breathy, sweaty abandonment.

The seasons turned, the kids grew and were healthy, money stacked up in the little wooden box, and so the years went by until a time came when Tim and Armie took their turn to host the harvest supper. Tim and Lizzie Hawthorne were having their annual pumpkin pie competition and Lizzie was trying to resist having another slice.

“I shouldn’t eat so much,” Lizzie was sighing. “I’m getting fat and I already look so old.”

Tim hugged her and said, “Don’t you say that! You’re the prettiest!”, but he gave Armie a wink and mouthed “you are” at him. 

“It’s not fair,” Lizzie complained. “You still look like a boy! You don’t look any different than when you first came here.”

Eli Hawthorne, who didn’t get about so much anymore, sitting in the corner in his rickety wheelchair, a slice of Tim’s pie on a plate in his lap, huffed, “No he don’t do he? No different at all. Always said, _queer_ feller.”

That night, the kids and animals settled, Armie sat by the back door looking at the stars hanging over the meadow while Tim pottered in the kitchen. He watched Tim move around, singing a little tunelessly to himself as he tidied up. It was true, Tim was just as beautiful and youthful as the day he’d met him, with his beech-leaf lips and his curling dark hair. Armie smiled at the memory. He would never forget his first sight of Tim looking in through the window of his truck, and he gazed at him now, absorbed and happy, and wondered at the incredible good fortune that had brought them together. He would never be tired of Tim’s face, it was the first thing he saw in the mornings and the last at night and, he thought, a touch maudlin at the end of a good day, he hoped it would be the last thing he’d see on this earth…  
… and then, all in a moment, as if someone had turned a switch and plunged their warm kitchen into cold blue light, he saw the aspect of that terrible face from the woods, superimposed onto Tim’s sweet features. 

It was so brief, like the burst of a camera flash, but Armie felt cold to his core. He squeezed his eyes shut and counted to five. When he opened them again, there was only his Tim looking up from covering a dish of potato salad and raising his eyebrows at him, the corner of his mouth ticking into a half-smile. 

Armie huffed a breath out, and shook his head to shake out the thought, and said, “Come here sweetheart.” He took the dishcloth from Tim’s shoulder and tossed it back in the direction of the sink, and pulled him onto his lap, holding him close. 

Tim kissed Armie’s hair and trailed his mouth down behind his ear, and said, “Mmm. How do you always smell so warm? You smell of the sun.”

Those words caused Armie to _think_ a noise, a noise which sounded, in his mind, like the dull crack of ice when you put a tentative foot out onto the frozen surface of a lake.

He shivered and pulled Tim into his arms. “Someone said something like that to me once before.” 

Tim lay still against him. Armie felt suddenly guilty that he had never shared the secret of that night with him. He could never be quite easy, he realised now, never feel quite at home until he had confessed his part in that strange encounter. He shifted so that Tim was sitting in his place in the chair and went to his knees in front of him, clasping his delicate hands between his own.

“I saw a face once, only once, as beautiful as yours. Weird thing is, just now, for a second, you looked just like him.” 

“Is that so?” said Tim. “Can you fit in some more pie? Lizzie always puts in too much cream and it won’t keep.”

“It’s funny, it was so long ago, years past.”

“…or coffee?” Tim yawned. “But maybe it’s too late.”

“No, listen… it was that night when John Parrish died out in the woods…”

Tim ran his hands round to the back of Armie’s collar and dipped under to touch the back of his neck. He hid his face in Armie’s shoulder and said into his shirt, “That must have been so sad for you. Come to bed.”

“No, I should tell you, I want to tell you. I trust you with everything and I’m so bad at saying things from my heart but I want you to know everything and surely it wouldn’t… it was so long ago.”

Tim hugged him tighter. 

“You don't need to tell me this, Armie. I don’t need to know everything you’ve ever done. Love can... build treehouses and store up jam money in a little wooden box but it can’t turn the world into itself.”

Armie shook his head. He felt an urgency about his confession and he didn’t have time to unpick one of Tim’s strange sentences. He unhooked Tim’s hands from around his neck and pushed him gently back so he could see his face.

“It was winter, in the cabin by the lake.” 

“Please.”

“Maybe it was nothing? Just a dream, but it was intense – we couldn't get home, John and I, and something came to us, an inhuman _thing_ -”

“You don’t need to say it. Why do you people always have to name things? Can’t you just let them be?”

“And it… he killed John, murdered him there in front of me, but he let me live.”

A cold breath of wind came in from the meadow and the door creaked on its hinges. Tim shook off Armie’s hands and stepped away from him towards the threshold, his arms wrapped across his body, his beautiful pale fingers hugging his shoulders.

“Why did he let you live?”

“I don’t know. I was sorry for him, his feet were bare in all that snow. He said… because of the smell of…”

“… because of the smell of the sun on your skin. And the gold in your hair. And the daylight sky in your eyes.”

“...he let me live, only I wasn’t... I wasn’t to…”

“You were not to tell.”

Beyond Tim, standing framed in the doorway, Armie saw snow begin to fall.

“... yes… but how… how do you know that?”

“Because it was me. _Me_.” And when Tim turned back to him, the golden autumn of their world was dead and all was cold and dark. “It was... Tim.”

Armie could not speak, he was back in his nightmare, shrinking in fear from his own Tim, his dear face, his gentle eyes, who was also the terrible figure of the ice and the woods. 

“You promised. You made your promise that night, that you’d never tell,” he said in the quiet voice that was like knives. “That was our pledge, for life. I told you then that to speak was to die.”

Armie fell to his knees and wept and pleaded but his kind Tim was gone, Tim's green eyes were black and his pink lips white, half-opened in a sneer revealing the deathly dark of his mouth. 

“I am lost. I should kill you.”

“I would …” Armie dared to say, “I would rather die than live without…”

“You betrayed me. No more words for us. I should kill you. And I would, but for the sake of those children asleep upstairs.” 

He passed by Armie without a change in his pitiless expression and at first Armie thought he was going to the children and moved as if to block the way, but he was only reaching for the old pink hoodie, which always hung on the kitchen peg, next to his apron, ready for cold days. He folded it carefully and put it on Sam’s chair and there was a last moment, as he smoothed it down, of Tim, his gentle touch.

He moved differently now, Tim’s spiky, fluid energy buried under his slow deliberateness and again he passed by Armie, nothing but implacable rage in his eyes.

“From now on, you had better take good care of them. If I ever hear they have reason to complain of you, I will make you sorry.”

Every door and window opened and an icy midwinter blizzard blew clouds of snow through the house. Tim – or the creature who had been for a while that lovely Tim – turned and left without a backward glance, fading into the dark night and cacophonous storm.

Armie sank back down to his knees, his arms around his head, sobbing still. Then he sprang up and ran out into the yard, stopping to scoop up Tim’s sneakers, decked out in the red laces he always chose. He set them down in the drift, the snow scratching at his face as he peered into the darkness. But there was nothing to see, only the snow blinding his eyes and the blizzard wind buffeting at him, taking his breath, and driving him back towards the house, where the door slammed behind him, leaving him in the sudden silence. After a while, he went quietly through the rooms, closing the windows and setting the furniture aright. Then he sat at the kitchen table and made an inventory of the life that was left there with him, the children and their soft breath, the animals, the red jam in its pots, and the neat account books.

**Author's Note:**

> I know - it's not my fault it ends like this. It's a take on the 'Snow Woman' (Yuki-Onna) legend, as told by Masaki Kobayashi [in the 1965 film _Kwaidan_](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqiy5o?playlist=x3c3) ('The Woman of the Snow' begins at 14.34.) I also looked at some [English translations of the original legend](http://anomalyinfo.com/Stories/1904-yuki-onna-lafcadio-hearn-0) and took some lines from it, as the film does.
> 
> This whole fic was conceived, commissioned, encouraged, demanded, hyped and brilliantly beta'd by Ghostcat. Think of me as her mechanical pencil rather than the author. Anything good in it likely comes from her while any failings are entirely mine. 
> 
> Happy birthday Ghost. I am a frozen up snow lady who, like arborist Armie, finds it hard to say things from my heart but if I could write you a hundred of these it wouldn't exhaust the reserves of my regard for you.


End file.
